Is He Done Yet?

With Rummy on a spit and with his front well done, let’s check and see if he’s ready to be turned.

First, the stated reasons for going into Iraq did not pan out. There were no WMDs found and there have been no confirmations that the Saddam government was in any way in cahoots with al Qaeda. Half forgotten and now swept under the rug is the fact that we were not leading a UN authorized mission to enforce Security Council Resolutions. The enforcement action was a construct of our government and its coalition partners, especially The United Kingdom.

When the primary reasons for the preemptive war fell flat, our government and its coalition partners reached into the rhetorical kit bag and decided that democracy and freedom were the primary needs to make the world safe for those of us living in the leafy suburbs, so, with a revisionism that would make the old Politburo proud, we had toppled Saddam’s evil government in order to make the benefits of Western style democracy available to wonderful people of Iraq who were just waiting for the chance to work together like hippies talking their way through their minor differences while roasting marshmallows in front of a camp fire.

After three years of nation building while the Iraqis struggle to form a government that represents the aspirations of all of the disparate groups, a great insurgency rages – an insurgency unanticipated by the president and his top advisors.

Best guess is that we will have invested more than a trillion dollars in this adventure before we stop the checks flowing sometime in the middle of the twenty-second century. Just to drift off point for a moment, the U.S. Civil War that ended in 1865 is only now being closed out as a fiscal problem with the deaths of the last dependents of those who fought at Gettysburg and Manassas. Old veterans seem quite able to reproduce long after they forgot what they were fighting about and they leave dependents with life spans that track ordinary actuarial tables. Five generation of Americans have been born since Appomattox and still we pay.

We’ve lost many more than two thousand men and women in Iraq, a war fought because Saddam was likely to share his weapons of mass destruction with al Qaeda. No weapons – no connection. There is no sign that these deaths are likely to stop accumulating; nor is it likely that the huge number of seriously wounded that daily converges on Walter Reed Hospital will have a diminished flow. The fiscal cost of this carnage, great as it is in present and future outlays, is not nearly as important as the human impact.

While working hard – as hard as a government can ever work – to prove the original bases for war to be true, there can be no doubt that Iraq is now a hotbed of jihad against the U.S. and the West. There’s no attempt to deny that the insurgency is at least partially being fought by affiliates of al Qaeda and that these people are using Iraq as a laboratory on how to engage Western style forces with all of their technological superiority.

Early on the administration stated that we were engaging the terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq so that we would not have to engage them here at home. That’s partially true. We engaged them in Afghanistan because that’s where most of the al Qaeda terrorists were congregating. We went after them and their protectors, the Taliban government, as we damn well should have.

While the same argument was made for Iraq, it wasn’t true at the time so far as we’ve been able to determine – no WMDs, no Saddam/al Qaeda connection, but it’s sure true today. But there can be no guarantees that this argument is working out since there have been attacks in London, Madrid and elsewhere that were I a resident of a coalition nation other than the U.S. would interpret as here rather than there.

Now as we begin to turn Rummy toward his uncooked flank, he and the administration say that the general officers who put him on this spit did their foul deed not because of Iraq but because they were too rigid and didn’t like it when he tried to turn them into a lean mean fighting machine. It’s but sour grapes because they resisted Rummy. My retort to that is sort of a Bushism, “Bring ‘em on!” You bet they resisted becoming too lean a fighting machine. General Shinseki opined that Iraq was going to take a much more corpulent force to sit on the sectarian factions, and he was right.

I’m not competent to say just how lean the military should be, but I sure as hell know that we don’t have enough troops in Iraq to stop those cats from cutting off each others heads. But I don’t want to lose sight of my basic point that we should never have gone in rather than not had a sufficient force. I’m just trying poke a hole in the sour grapes argument being put forth in defense of Don. If Rummy has to go so that the president can find medieval theological manner out of this morass, so be it. Turn him over.

Wrong war, wrong reasons, wrong, wrong, wrong - that’s enough `Ws' for today.

Blog on!

Wild Bill